Tuesday, April 15, 2014

RETRO NECRO - THE RISE OF BOX SET MONUMENTALISM

The New Monumentalism in Reissues and Box Sets

director's cut, The Wire, 2013 End of Year Issue / January 2014

by Simon Reynolds

Blame it on Nick Cave’s “A Box For Black Paul”, but box
sets have always been associated in my mind with coffins.A resemblance more pronounced in the early
days of the CD reissue boom, when boxes were typically oblong and came with
lids, but the association endures on account of the serene and solemn aura that
hangs around these music memorials. Here lies an Oeuvre, or a Genre, long since
severed from the living world of music. Like Lifetime Achievement Awards, box
sets are honours that almost invariably accrue to artists whose culturally
productive phase is passed.

Owning music, old or new, in physical form is steadily
becoming a minority pursuit: a habit elders can’t relinquish, an archaism
adopted for gestural reasons (in the case of vinyl) by hip youngsters. Even with those who still buy solid-form releases,
the provision of download codes suggests that the actual everydayusage of music is increasingly immaterial.Yet perversely, in seeming inverse ratio to
the shrinking market for and vanishing utility of analogue formats,reissues and box sets keep expanding in size
and sumptuousness. Some are getting like
those ostentatious haute-bourgeois family vaults in cemeteries likePère-Lachaise.

Case in point:The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records
1917-1932, a casket-like extravaganza of oak, silver birch, sage velvet and
gold leaf. The 87 tracks of blues, jazz and gospel engraved into six vinyl
platters are just the crème of a total 800 supplied in MP3 form on a USB stick.
This inclusion jars aesthetically and
philosophically with the package’s repro antique look, perhaps even sabotages
it: one can easily imagine the purchaser never actually getting round to
playing the LPs in practice, but instead using the iPod-ready digitized versions.Acquiring this ten kilo monstrosity would
mean – excuse the pun – coffin up around $400.And the same amount again, if you aim to complete the set:yes, this is just Volume 1 and another chunky
lump of audio-furniture is due in November 2014, via the collaborative auspices
of Revenant and Jack White’ s Third Man Records.

Reissue monumentalism comes in several subcategories.Rise
and Fall is an example of the archaeological treasure chest:multiple volumes of long out-of-print or
never-before-released material. Another is the drastic inflation of a single
iconic album, such as T. Rex’sThe Slider: not the two-CD deluxe
treatment that’s just standard business nowadays, but sturdy cases containing
multiple CDs + a DVD + 180 gram vinyl version, along with in-depth booklets and
an array of repro memorabilia (badges, flyers, tickets, press photos, etc).
Then there’s the Complete Works of a legendary artist, sometimes snazzed up
with a gimmicky repackage (The Clash’s boombox-shaped Sound System) or more
soberly collated at intimidating scale (the 34 disc mega-anthology of Herbie
Hancock’s Columbia years, as reviewed by Greg Tate in The Wire 357). A
relatively recent development is the rise of live hyper-documentation,
pioneered by the Grateful Dead in 2011 with a 66 CD set of their entire 1972
European tour, and echoed this year by King Crimson’s The Road To Red, whose 22
CDS + DVD track the group’s 1974 tour of North America immediately prior to the
recording of the classic Red album.

The monumentalist trend hovers unwholesomely at the
intersection of niche market capitalism (squeeze the hardcore fanbase for every
last drop), consumer bad faith (fans all too happy to be squeezed for the
chance to reconsume/relive something they’ve already consumed/ lived through) and
heritage culture (everything deserves documenting, nothing should be discarded).Okay, let’s be fair here: genuine curiosity,
unstinting curatorial dedication, an arguably noble impulse to salvage for
posterity’s sake, are all at work too, sometimes.What I personally find disquieting, though - as someone who has succumbed to the fetish-appeal
and completest logic of these sets more than a few times - is that even when the best motives are
involved, the preservationist impulse almost
by definition embalms what was once a living force in the world, draws it into
cordoned-off seclusion.

Box sets
represent an incursion of the “museal” into the domestic space; they are
micro-museums in your own home.The more
imposing these box sets get as physical objects, the more listening to their
contents feels like an imposition (albeit a self-inflicted one).Just like visiting a museum, what begins
with real enthusiasm rapidly gets to feel like a chore, an ordeal. Gorging your
senses and sensibility with too much in too little time leads to an experience
that unhappily commingles edification and excess, duty and decadence.

Real musical life lies elsewhere.In his review of the Paramount box (Wire
358), Phil England noted that the label was known in its own era for “quantity
over quality”: it pumped out thousands of tunes, recorded at levels of fidelity
inferior even by the standards of the time and pressed on low-grade
shellac.In other words, Paramount’s approach—short
term, mercenary, they even melted down their masters for metal eventually--was
the absolute opposite of the reverence of Revenant, the tender care and luxuriant
largesse of Third Man.

Fast-money
music, issued almost without discrimination, Paramount’s "race music" was the early
20th Century equivalent of early 21st Century street
beats: the shitty-sound-quality tracks thronging and teeming through the infosphere
as YouTube remixes, pirate radio sets, Soundcloud mixes, phone-to-phone swapped
MP3s,etc - the ceaseless and promiscuous
outflow of urban dance cultures like North of England’s jackin’ house, Los Angeles ratchet rap, and the innumerable ghetto dance sounds of the developing world.Just like Paramount’s78s of songs and instrumentals, these modern dance styles are rowdy, bawdy, and
“lowly”; looked-down-on by upstanding
citizens and discerning music fans alike.

It is a structural inevitability that future equivalents to
Fahey, White, and other epigone-custodians in that Robert Crumb/Terry Zwigoff
mold, will emerge to collate these disposable sounds. But that’s a process that
only happens once their original audience has disposed of them.(The syndrome has already kicked off with
early rap and electro, early house and dancehall and jungle, of course. Expect
grime, screw, and crunk salvage to begin in earnest soon). These future antiquarians
will hunt down fugitive MP3s and resurrect long-ago dried-up streams. They will
annotate their conditions of making, auterise their makers, and assemble their
findings into archives that may be physical and exclusively priced,or immaterial and freely public. But as with The Rise and Fall of Paramount
Records, the original experience of this music—what it was made for, how it was
used—will be largely irrecoverable.Which is perhaps how it should be.Everything has its time and its
place.

1 comment:

Which I gathered was supposed to "complete" at the time. But I guess it wasn't, since I once knew a girl whose short-lived attempt at starting her own label resulted in exactly one release, that release being a Merzbow album that doesn't appear t/b included on the above.